A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...

A key part of the hypothesis is its focus on mineral nanoparticles that are naturally abundant and still move through oceans, ...

They say the reaction might have made the building blocks of DNA and RNA, both essential for life.

Something written in every biology textbook of the past 70 years may need a rewrite. Not because the science was careless, or the scientists were wrong to try – but because the tools available at the ...

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun ...

Billions of years of evolution have made modern cells incredibly complex. Inside cells are small compartments called organelles that perform specific functions essential for the cell’s survival and ...

Ten years ago, nobody knew that Asgard archaea even existed. In 2015, however, researchers examining deep-sea sediments discovered gene fragments that indicated a new and previously undiscovered form ...

In a new book, astrophysicist Mario Livio describes how the existence of life on Earth can be traced back to an RNA-based “protocell.” The following is an excerpt from Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest ...

When and where did life on Earth begin? What ingredients does the recipe for life require? Is there life out there beyond the stars, and if so, did it arise in the same way? Or are we alone in the ...

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology’s most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...